10 reasons not to buy Friday’s Telegraph

by danhon

1) It’s expensive: Buy a daily broadsheet like the Telegraph and you are throwing money down the drain. You will be paying a lot more than other news providers, who are giving their news away for free on the internet or via free newspapers like The Metro.

2) It’s anti-technology: you’re buying a newspaper that tells you not to buy things without having tried them, where its opinions are factually inaccurate.

3) No video: the Telegraph comes on paper, and is hardly even animated, even when you’re throwing it in the trash. Its opinion pieces are animated, but in the wrong way.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on the Telegraph? Oh, you can’t. It doesn’t do that. It doesn’t play MP3s either. There are rumours that Saturday’s Telegraph might play MP3s, but only DRM ones from the Telegraph’s store, so don’t buy Saturday’s Telegraph either.

4.1) No multitasking: Tried reading more than one article at a time, or having more than three pages open? You can’t! You only have two eyes! The Telegraph doesn’t come with more eyes, and also doesn’t come with a handy way for you to keep multiple articles open at the same time on the same page. Although it does display multiple articles on the same page, you can’t choose them – they’re “dictated” to you by the “editor” of the paper. This is the same editor who would decree that you wouldn’t want to see porn in the Telegraph.

5) Its reporters are terrible: this problem isn’t unique to the Telegraph, but look at other newspapers like the Financial Times, or magazines like the Economist. Better researched articles, better quality of commentary, and yet with the Telegraph, with the same delivery mechanism, you get at best equal performance.

6) Reading it is costing you money: the Telegraph costs lots of money to produce, and it only gets printed on special newsprint. All of that, every day, comes out of money that could be channelled away from a self-important minority (e.g. Telegraph readers) and towards more generally useful ideas, like, say, the BBC.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones: sit next to someone reading the Telegraph and you can practically hear everything they’re thinking, from their views on taxation and social equality to education and immigration. It’s another example of the Telegraph charging a premium price – compared to, say The Sun, but delivering an equally buggy product.

8) It’s not very well designed: use the Telegraph as a newspaper and with the intent to be well-informed about the world around you and it’s not going to work. It’s a newspaper that happens to have badly researched opinions written in it masquerading as news. Jack of two trades, but master of neither.

9) It charges for satnav: the Telegraph will always let you know that you’re the centre of your own very special uninformed universe.

10) Those newspapers are holding back better technologies: as every hotel still thinks it should provide newspapers, the momentum behind this technology is only dying. But if it wasn’t for such bad opinion “journalism” masquerading as fact, we’d have a more-informed populace better equipped to deal with today’s rapidly changing world.